A festive centerpiece at our team meeting on January 31.

One of several shapes of equal area which we towed through the water.  The results of these tests helped us determine what size and shape of "flapper" we would use on our propulsion system. 

Thus far all of our testing has been conducted at the pool at North Point High School.  Charles County Parks and Recreation Department has been wonderfully supportive of our efforts.

Greg Ferris, a retired engineer, runs a commercial bee operation and sawmill and wood shop.  He's a modern renaissance man.  He even cut down a tree for us and milled it into boards.  Today we bought the boards from him to use for steam bending longitudinal ribs for our 1/2 scale model.

Today we didn't do any testing. Our resolution was broken. Today we just met to regroup after Christmas Break.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Our neighbor, John Hollyfield, a local industrial arts teacher, shows us his PVC steamer.

We duplicated this wood steamer, got green wood boards (sweet gum) from a local sawmill, ripped them into strips and bent them to a form we constructed which mimicked the hull outline.  These bent strips became the longitudinal ribs shown in our earlier posts on the scale model.